News Room

MIDDLEBURY, Vt. - The Middlebury College Bread Loaf Writers' Conference announced the winners of the 12th annual Katharine Bakeless Nason Literary Publication Prizes. The prizes are awarded each year to aid and encourage writers seeking publication of their first books in a particular genre.

The judge for the poetry category was Stanley Plumly, author of "The Marriage in the Trees" (1997) and "Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry" (2003). He chose Aaron Baker's "Mission Work" for the 2007 Bakeless poetry prize.

Baker received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Virginia and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Creative Writing at Stanford University. Born in Graham, Wash., he has lived in Mexico, Germany and Papua New Guinea, where his parents were missionaries in a remote village of the Chimbu Highlands. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New England Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Poetry Northwest, Post Road and Prairie Schooner, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, an online resource. He currently lives in Charlottesville, Va., with his wife, the poet Jennifer Chang, and teaches literature and writing at James Madison University.

Short story writer Amy Hempel served as the judge for fiction. She chose Steven Wingate's "Wifeshopping" for the 2007 Bakeless fiction prize.

Wingate received the 2006 Fiction Prize from both Gulf Coast and The Journal. His work has appeared in Mississippi Review, River City, Quarter After Eight, Exquisite Corpse and the anthology "Degenerative Prose: Writing Beyond Category" (1995). Prior to receiving the Bakeless Prize, "Wifeshopping" was a finalist for the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction. Wingate holds a Master of Fine Arts from Florida State University and teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he founded the literary annual Divide.

Terry Tempest Williams, an activist and naturalist author, served as the judge for the creative nonfiction prize. She selected Dustin Beall Smith's "Only Endless Consequence" for the 2007 Bakeless nonfiction prize.

Smith's essays have appeared in The Sun, The Gettysburg Review, The New York Times Magazine, The Louisville Review, Hotel Amerika, Quarto, River Teeth, Writing on the Edge and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He holds a Master of Fine Arts from Columbia University and teaches writing at Gettysburg College.

The three winning authors will have their book length manuscripts published by Houghton Mifflin in its distinguished Mariner Original Paperback line. In addition, they will receive fellowships to attend the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference in August of 2008.

Complete guidelines for the Bakeless Literary Publication Prizes are available online at http://www.bakelessprize.org. Judges for the 2008 prizes will be Eavan Boland for poetry, Antonya Nelson for fiction, and Tom Bissell for creative nonfiction. New submissions will be accepted from Sept. 15 through Nov. 1, 2007.

For more information contact Ian Pounds, the Bakeless Prize coordinator for the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, at (802) 443-2018 or bakeless@middlebury.edu.